Understanding the numbers correctly is crucial if you are going to make any decisions involving the financial position of your business. Effective business planning is useless without it.
However, many people feel uncomfortable with just simply punching in numbers into a calculator. Uncertain at this point if they’ve got this right, they are then often reluctant to move forward to reflect on the outcomes of the number crunching exercise – the most important bit. The use of calculators are avoided on the mentoring or training sessions. Spreadsheets are definitely the preferred tool for doing the number input stuff, as you can visually check that all the initial figures have been added correctly (and in the right order!).
It’s not rocket Science
The good news is that if you can already add up and take away – and most people can, you are well poised to gain a firm footing on developing the fundamental finance skills that will significantly boost your confidence in the general decision-making process in the business planning process.
Practice makes perfect
We can create working spreadsheets for you, but if you want to DIY (strongly encouraged), there are a lot of spreadsheet worksheets to work through and practise on, to build up confidence (as many times as needed). Ian will decide on which are required at each mentoring session.
If time is a key issue, Ian will work closely with you, to create spreadsheets documents that match your specific business needs (i.e. develop a set of ‘easy to use’ templates). If you then go on to use spreadsheet materials as part of your marketing process these can be fully branded – logo, contact and images etc.
The aim is to finally hand over a set of professionally prepared spreadsheet applications, that so that clients are able to continue to use, apply and amend (themselves) for other clients or different situations (on-going).
